how vine died but TikTok was able to thrive
In: Economics
Answer: Money. Vine existed before the internet had figured out how to exactly make money. It was an interesting thing, but as it grew so did the costs, so eventually it became too expensive to run and was shut down. There was a time before ads were everywhere and tied to everything on the internet. Tiktok came after YouTube monetization and Instagram influencers were a common thing, and was able to generate money for people.
Twitter didn’t intend to continue Vine, they scrapped the company for parts and tried to convince creators to switch to Twitter. Seems like nobody in this thread paid any attention when this shit was going down.
People are missing Moores law here. Data storage, transfer, and basically everything has gotten an order of magnitude cheaper and easier.
Tiktok isn’t just a short form video app.
It’s the world’s most advanced “next video that you likely enjoy” prediction system. The more you use it the better it gets.
It solves “discoverability” which is the biggest problem of all media consolidation services.
Why is Tiktok more popular? Because it’s way more technically advanced than the competition and has significant first mover advantage. Copy cats from Google and Meta are still playing catch-up without much success.
TikTok’s recommendation algorithm is a completely different beast. Lots of people saying both platforms are short form video and thus are 1:1 but I’d argue that the real differentiating factor is *how effective the videos are delivered* to individual users.
Other answers about timing, funding, and company goals are great. But TikTok is also much better than Vine as a platform.
The obvious difference is Vine’s 6-second limit. It’s hard to make a video that short – it’s only 1-2 sentences of speaking time. So Vine clips are campy and spastic. TikTok had no limit (or a much longer one), allowing TikTok videos to be more normal and have more variety – with personal stories, stunts, skits, all sorts of things.
TikTok has the social media functionality – which Vine may not have had. You can follow your IRL friends, and make videos effectively just for each other.
TikTok has editing tools like video captions, comment quotes, and filters, which can make it fun to use and easier to do certain videos like . What middle-school girl didn’t want to get a video of herself with dog ears / puppy face?
Tiktok has duets.
TikTok also has sound sharing – the audio clips can be separated from a video and used by other videos. It’s a simple feature, but very important. It enables dance trends, lip sync trends, other meme-like trends, and music promotion, all of which seemed to be huge pieces of TikTok’s popularity at some point. You can see someone do a dance, use the exact same music clip, do the same dance, and join in that little event. Sound sharing is an innovation with a real payoff.
So TikTok really does provide a variety of features that make it easy to do a wider range of videos and to support popular trends.
You’re 5
One parent feeds you only hersheys kisses and jolly ranchers, since you tried those and said you liked hersheys kisses and jolly ranchers
You eventually get bored of that
The other parent, given your preferences, figures out that you also like a bunch of other sweets and although still feeds you junk garbage, changes it up enough and is constantly figuring out what else you like
Most five year olds would prefer this parent
A lot of the answers are accepting the premise of the question as true but honestly, TikTok hasn’t really been popular for much longer than Vine was, and while I don’t think it’s quite over I think we’re seeing some hints it might begin a downward trajectory soon.
There is a BBC podcast on failed companies/ideas, including one on Vine here
https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/m001y2zj?partner=uk.co.bbc&origin=share-mobile
It includes interviews with people who started it.
Vine was essentially owned by twitter, and then some exec realised Vine and twitter had significant overlap in customer appeal and that by having both they were splitting the userbase and each site was suffering in numbers because of it.
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